$1 Streams: Get It While It's Hot

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$1 Streams: Get It While It's Hot

A Taiwanese website is selling streams of new and classic Hollywood movies for $1 – in clear violation of international copyright agreements, American intellectual property advocates, government officials and copyright lawyers all say.

The site, movie88.com, is streaming thousands of American movies, from Legally Blonde to Judgment at Nuremberg, as well as a number of Japanese and Chinese films. A $1 fee buys three days of unlimited access to RealVideo versions of each title.

Movie88.com starts each user account with $5, so the first five films are free.

Movie88.com's operators claim what they're doing is perfectly legal.

"All the materials, movies and films in Movie88.com are lawful and free from copyright infringement under the laws of the Republic of China," the Movie88 website reads. "If you are a copyright owner of any materials, movies and films used in Movie88.com, and you feel that your copyright is protected in the Republic of China, kindly contact us by filing and submitting the particulars below."

"There's no question this is illegal," he said. "The website should be taken down and the operators prosecuted. They are clearly, no question, violating Taiwan's copyright law.

Taiwan's most recent intellectual property law, enacted in 1998, holds that "authors have the exclusive right to reproduce their works."

Making a RealVideo copy of a movie would violate this provision, Smith said. The law also says, "Authors of audio visual works have the exclusive right to publicly present their works."

Movie88 certainly seems to be making a public presentation.

"Taiwan's copyright law is substantially parallel to the laws of most other nations, and therefore the unauthorized display of a movie over a website would violate the domestic law of (Taiwan)," New York University School of Law professor Roger E. Schechter said in an e-mail.

This law is being further strengthened to bring Taiwan into full compliance with the so-called "Trade Related aspects of Intellectual Property rightS" (TRIPS) agreement that's required of all members of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Taiwan joined the WTO Jan. 1, 2001.

A decade earlier, the United States and Taiwan signed bilateral agreements guaranteeing that works copyrighted in one country would be protected in the other, a government official closely involved with international intellectual property matters said.

But enforcing these laws has proven difficult, to say the least.

In the year 2000 alone, American companies lost over $550 million due to piracy in Taiwan, according to the IIPA. That led the U.S. trade representative last April to put Taiwan on a "priority watch list" of 16 countries that don't adequately protect intellectual property.

If a movie studio or the Motion Picture Association of America (whose representatives could not be reached for comment) wants to go after movie88.com for its practices, it can't just sue the Taiwanese firm directly.

First, the Americans would have to go to the Taiwanese authorities, which are "notorious for the wink-wink, nod-nod approach to these issues," said James Feinerman, associate dean of the Georgetown University Law Center. "Ripping off the intellectual properties of rich, first-world countries just isn't seen as that serious an offense."

If the Taiwanese government didn't remedy the situation, then the Americans could go to the U.S. Trade Representative, who could file a complaint with the WTO. If the WTO was convinced this problem was a widespread enough, the body could give the United States permission to impose trade sanctions on Taiwan.

Feinerman said, "There's theoretical (copyright) protection, but to avail yourself of it is time-consuming and expensive."